Apple Helps By Not Helping, Free Ringtones For Your iPhone [UPDATEx3]

Just recently, Marcus and I had a long debate about the custom ringtone feature in the iPhone, or rather the lack of it. When released in June, many people were disappointed to find out that there was no way you could use your own favorite MP3s as your ringtone. You were pretty much stuck with the couple of generic ringtones Apple provided with the iPhone.

But recently, there were a couple of unofficial solutions that surfaced. Namely iToner and iFuntastic on the mac and iPhoneRingToneMaker for the PC (notice how apps on Windows usually come with these less than inspiring names...sheesh). But with the whole 'pay another $0.99 for your very own custom ringtone' announcement Apple made last Thursday, it was clear Apple wasn't going to let us use our own MP3s as ringtones, but we had to pay for the privilege to use them as ringtones.

I can see that it's meant to protect the recording companies and Apple does mention that it's much cheaper than paying for ringtones outside, but come on, it's just too much to expect people to pay double for the rights to own a song to listen to and to use it as a ringtone.

Let me just state that those apps that I mentioned earlier to enable custom ringtones, they don't work anymore with iTunes 7.4. So hence the whole debate with Marcus.

But... I found out today that someone has defeated the system, proving to us that it's not as hard as we thought it would be. Superb news for everyone who has a iPhone.

The complete and ridiculously easy guide to putting custom ringtones on your iPhone

Ok, for those of us who have no use for the guide, let me explain to you why this method is so freaking awesome.

First, it's simply just choosing the song (aac format) you want and changing the extension to .M4R. Once you sync it with your iPhone, it'll be treated just like a 'official' purchased ringtone.

Second, this is just to simple to be a complete mistake. Many believe that this is a deliberate decision by Apple to make the recording companies happy, while leaving the back door completely open for the user. Only time will tell whether this is true.

Some might argue why Apple can't make it officially free, but you have to remember that the entire existence of the iTunes music store is based on all those companies contract with Apple. Companies not happy = iTunes music store die. I sure hope that one day, we'll have a super easy way to do this, 'cause even now, its still not completely fool proof, as more and more readers report problems and complications over at Macrumors.

[UPDATE]
So far there are a couple of new developments:

• only works with unprotected, aac files
• must be edited to be a certain length
• problems deleting files out of iTunes

Once again, why this is cooler than the rest of the earlier apps that was released - this method is basically preparing the songs to trick iTunes into treating it as a purchased ringtone. That alone makes this method so much more better than the rest.

[UPDATE 2]
Well, it was fun while it lasted. Apple seem to have broken this method too with their latest iTunes update, version 7.4.1. Read Here

[UPDATE 3]
It's baaaccckk... Check it out here It's basically renaming the file from M4R to M4A and adding it back to iTunes. Looks like 7.4.2 will soon be out